If you want to understand what is actually happening with militant Islamist terror please take the time to read this article by Hassan Hassan. As he says, “Islamic traditions are filled with stories of mercy and tolerance. But it is not enough to tell these stories in isolation from other dark chapters in Islamic history that feed groups such as Isis… Islamic fundamentalism is Isis’s ideology, so to speak, and every act has to be grounded in religious traditions.”

Hassan Hassan is an analyst at the Delma Institute, a research center in Abu Dhabi. He is co-author, with Michael Weiss, of Isis: Inside the Army of Terror, to be published this month in New York by Regan Arts.

ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

Isis has reached new depths of depravity. But there is a brutal logic behind it

By Hassan Hassan

Excerpt:

The burning to death in a locked cage of captured Jordanian pilot Muadh al- Kasasbeh by Islamic State (Isis), … was barbarous even by its own brutal standards… The group struggled to justify the live immolation of a Muslim prisoner with the ease it did in previous cases of heinous crimes…

… In previous cases, Isis found little difficulty in citing evidence to back the religious legitimacy of its acts. Beheading, crucifixion and hand-lopping did not require much reasoning because these punishments are part of the penal code of countries such as Saudi Arabia. Also, Isis cites isolated incidents described in sacred texts that (contrary to most Muslim clerics) it believes should be followed as rules to justify obscure punishments, including throwing gay people from high buildings. But with its latest action, many believe Isis has alienated previous supporters in the region. Even though some still criticised the pilot’s participation in the US-led bombing campaign in Syria, anger and resentment against Isis defined public opinion in Jordan and beyond, including among them sympathetic individuals such as Abu Sayyaf, a prominent Salafist leader in Jordan who approved of the immolation but not the publicity that accompanied it.

So in the Middle East, the savagery of the murder has raised the question: why is Isis so cruel? …

… Savagery is part of Isis’s ideological DNA … One of the most prominent of those jihadi texts is a book called Idarat al-Tawahush, or Management of Savagery, by an anonymous jihadi ideologue who calls himself Abu Bakr Naji. The book, translated by William McCants of the US Brookings Institution in 2006, has been widely distributed on jihadist online forums…

… The Management of Savagery’s greatest contribution lies in its differentiation between the meaning of jihad and other religious tenets. The author argues that the way jihad is taught “on paper” makes it harder for young mujahideen and Muslims to grasp the true meaning of the concept. “One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, [deterrence] and massacring,” Naji writes, as translated by McCants. “I am talking about jihad and fighting, not about Islam and one should not confuse them. He cannot continue to fight and move from one stage to another unless the beginning state contains a stage of massacring the enemy and deterring him.”

The concept Isis used to justify the massacre of hundreds of Shaitat tribesmen in Deir Ezzor, Syria, in August was tashreed, a word that can be translated as “deterrence”, as mentioned in the quoted text. “That is the true jihad,” said Abu Moussa, an Isis-affiliated religious cleric, echoing Naji’s text. “The layman who learned some of his religion from [mainstream] clerics think of jihad as a fanciful act, conducted far away from him. In reality, jihad is a heavy responsibility and requires toughness.”

Naji’s book offers practical tips on how to fill the power vacuum left by what he calls the retreating armies of the west and its regional agent regimes, as a result of gradual violence applied by the mujahideen. He says that the defeat of the crusaders in the past was not a result of decisive battles between the Muslim and Christian armies, but was a process of exhaustion and depletion …

… Naji says that people think of Muslims at the time of the crusaders as one state, led by Saladin al-Ayubi and Nouradin Zinki, but “the fact is they were small families controlling citadels and fighting jihad against crusaders on a low level, in a hard hitting way … Random acts of violence are not enough in this context. Brutality has to be ever more savage, creative and shocking …

… Islamic traditions are filled with stories of mercy and tolerance. But it is not enough to tell these stories in isolation from other dark chapters in Islamic history that feed groups such as Isis. Isis uses these stories, combined with ideas and concepts accepted by the mainstream, as part of an ideology and a political project in the making. Muslim clerics speak in the realm of theory; Isis practises through stories and action.

What the group does is to match its practices with the “practical” history of Islam, even though many rightly view these practices as contradictory to Islamic teachings. The genius of Isis is that it makes people compare between its acts and those of early Muslims, rather than between its practices and the jihad “on paper”.